Television viewing is part of daily life for many people. The wealth of content available from television service providers allows many people to find entertaining and informative programming despite their varying interests. As a result, television also provides a source of communication for government officials to provide emergency alerts and information. Most emergency alerts pertain to a specific geographic location within a television viewing area. Because television viewing areas can cover multiple locations, such as multiple counties, many viewers will receive emergency alerts that do not apply to them. Some systems attempt to determine which viewers should receive an emergency alert prior to transmission, and the alert is unicast to those viewers. However, such unicast connections can require extensive resources and can prevent scalability of a television service network. Hence, there is a need for a system and method of communicating emergency alerts.